Rediscovered "fortune" and odd fortune files. All automated system emails now have a fortune at the end. People seem to be reading the emails (I track) more, apparently to read the fortune at the end. Maybe they even read the body more? Most recent: "Your boss climbed the corporate ladder, wrong by wrong." #sysadmin #devops

An aquantance referred someone to me for some geek work. They apparently looked at my website and said I was "snarky". Awesome. They probably would not have been fun to work with.

On the tail of the massive AWS DNS causes outage, this is stupid simple. It seems a network I am remoted into has some weird "everything is slow" issues. Sigh. Their DHCP server is handing out 0.0.0.0 as the primary DNS. Groan. So everything is timing out on initial connections. Screaming into the void no longer makes me feel better. The void is just too busy with more important screams.

"tail -f haystack.log | grep -e needle -e thread" Wonder how much of my life I've spent keeping half an eye on a log file this way. Sometimes both of them. #sysadmin #devops

It seems that if I mention EFF and espeically things like the RayHunter on Facebook, it gets buried. Hard to quantify, but sure seems that way. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying #EFF #IMSI

If your website says I must accept cookies to view or navigate your products page: Fire your website developer.

Why the important things were not running: "cron[905]: (*system*) ERROR (Missing newline before EOF, this crontab file will be ignored)" #devops #sysadmin #cron

Was chasing a time zone intermittent ghost. The client had picked: Pacific/Honolulu instead of America/Los_Angeles. Technically, yes.. both "Pacific" time zones... If I could go back in time an set one thing right in the world it would be how we think about and manage time/time zones. The thought of changing clocks for "daylight saving" would be a taboo death sentence issue for starters. #time #timezone

I like to to "apt get update" on critical servers manually, watching the update scroll, looking for errors or weirdness. Then, the reboot. Gotta walk away for a couple of minutes, maybe make a post like this, to distract myself from the "will it boot" anxiety. Anxiety justified. Didn't boot. /dev/sda not found. F. Don't panic. Shut it down. Wait a minute and power it back up. Grab your towel and don't panic. Reboot. There it is! And all is good. Relax.

Last week I relased code, system UI and support for an App that requires MacOS or Windows, and I have neither to test with. It was tested on a Mac at work. Once. Actual customers started using it today, with good results. In the worst possible network conditions. Shout out to Acrobits.net for good VoIP softphones, also on Windows and Mac as well as the usual Android and iOS. #VoIP #Softphones

Getting ready for a cross country adventurish multi-vehicle road trip next year with friends and family, Just installed a BTECH/Baofeng GMRS50PRO and went legit (now required) with the FCC for $35. Worst internet web form and payment interface process since 1995, but I am now WSKG487. Between Meshtastic, Weboost, GMRS and maybe adding sat link, we'll look like a NASA expedition. Perhaps it's time to study up and go full on HAM as well? At least 2-Meter. #GMRS #HAM #FCC #RV

Rule: "Do all time functions in one place, preferably SQL" I mixed some PHP and SQL and broke time. They don't always agree. My new rule: "Use SQL for ALL time" And yeah.. gotta use some JS for some things. And a plug for good docs. Thanks Mozilla: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/input/datetime-local #MariaDB #SQL #PHP #Programming #Mozilla

I really should change the company "slogan" to: "Making working systems from vague illogical specifications since 1996" #programming #systems #specifications #humor

A reason to run your own DNS server is so you can get it to lie for you. Then you can point the systems having issues to use your lying DNS server. Nothing nefarious... just getting things to go where it needed to go. Maybe tomorrow, they'll have their own stuff working again. Maybe. It seems harder to find people that know how the core internet things actually work, they all use some service and when it fails, they are stuck. #DNS

If you can't write real code with just a basic text editor, you can't code. It's an unpopular opinion in the modern world, with all the assistance, code completion, "AI", etc... but basic skills without crutches/assistance are important. #code #programming

Just fixed some system automation scripts usin the most underrated command: SLEEP Gotta give busy servers time to do what they gotta do. #DevOps #SysAdmin

Did a clean install of Debian 13 on my primary carry laptop (Lenovo X1 Carbon). I love and use the Cinnamon interface. Setting grub to "splash" gets me a nice screen for decrypting the drive. That FreeCad, Prusa-Slicer and F3D are all the latest and native (apt get..) made me very happy. Everything just works: audio, wifi, network, openvpn. Donations made via: https://co.clickandpledge.com/advanced/default.aspx?wid=34115 #debian #trixie #linux

Spent a lot of time in just under 3 months fixing up a 196? FAN Luxury Liner travel trailer for my wife to stay in when visiting the kids/grandkid. Some high tech electrical and HVAC, 3d printed parts... and an insane amount of elbow grease. Calling it done. Photos: https://geeklabs.com/app.php/photo #RV #trailer #project #Vagabond

Whether from a Butlerian Jihad, or the "AI" actually getting very good, we will eventually have to purge all of the bad AI slop we've created. #AI #purge

I create a lot of my own sysadmin tools instead of useing "popular" ones. By the time I understand the common tool, and how it works, and all the options, and want to extend or change something: I could have created my own doing just (and only) the thing I needed. Also, I stopped using X as a variable, peeps might think I'm talking about Twitter. Am afraid to go see what XYZ.com might be. #programming #utilities #devops #sysadmin